The World Cup kicks off this week: cue blanket media coverage and scores of football puns. We’ll of course be following the tournament’s progress, but will be keeping an even closer eye on how the world streams – and how broadcasters monetise – live content.

Our server-side DAI technology is being used by multiple broadcasters across four continents to monetise the 2018 World Cup, with every viewer worldwide delivered a one-to-one addressable live stream.

Major live events have driven huge innovation in the live OTT arena, particularly in monetisation and scale. Yospace has developed an advanced system to pace ad requests, called pre-fetch, which lessens the load on ad servers during those moments when all viewers go to an ad break simultaneously – an innovation which earned Yospace a Sports Technology Award recently with BT Sport.

When it comes to monetisation of live events, scale is of course becoming increasingly important. In 2016, a record 2.3 million people live-streamed England’s Euro 2016 win over Wales, via the BBC Sport website; more than doubling the channel’s previous audience number. This figure contributed to (another) record-breaking 14.6 million unique visitors who live-streamed Euro content on the site on a single day. It is widely expected that these figures will be eclipsed during the World Cup.

In fact, we expect live streaming records to be broken this Summer by all host broadcasters in the UK: BBC, ITV and STV. The latter two monetise their streams using Yospace’s server-side DAI.

On a global scale, a brief glance at Akamai’s figures are further proof of the increasing popularity of live sports streaming amongst fans: from the maximum peak traffic of 1.4Tbs generated by 2012’s Superbowl, which leaps to peak traffic of 6.9Tbp for 2014’s football World Cup.

Earlier this year Akamai set a global streaming record of 10.3 million concurrent viewers for a VIVO Indian Premier League match – another record that could well be broken in the next few weeks. Yospace expect to break concurrency records for personalised SSAI, too.

While scale will no doubt be the focus of industry headlines, the sub-plot of the story is viewer experience and reliability. Advertisements must be seamlessly integrated into a live stream to ensure a true TV-quality experience for millions of football fans, and – for broadcasters monetising content and advertisers relying on its success – form a frictionless component of the end-to-end delivery mechanism for live sports streaming.

Football – as with most sports – is unpredictable. Whilst this delivers edge-of-your-seat viewing experiences to fans, these nervous moments must be the result of the outcome of the match, not the outcome of a poor viewing experience.

We’ll steer clear of predicting the winners and losers amongst this year’s World Cup qualifying teams, but one thing Yospace can reliably predict is the quality of end-user experience for many of the millions of viewers who’ll be going OTT in the coming weeks. And in turn, scoring wins for advertisers and broadcasters alike.

Staines-upon-Thames, UK – 17th January 2018Yospace and NexStreaming have today announced an integration that simplifies the route to market for broadcasters wishing to monetise their live OTT streams.

The companies have pre-integrated Yospace’s HTML5 SDK into the NexPlayer HTML5 player, allowing Yospace’s multi-award-winning Server-Side Dynamic Ad Insertion to be accompanied by real-time, client-side tracking. The integration also enables an interactive element to advertisements by allowing viewers to click on ads for more information on the product.

The news is significant for broadcasters, who today are faced with an online marketplace in which device and platform fragmentation significantly complicates the process of delivering and effectively measuring their advertising. Unlike traditional television, where broadcasters and advertisers benefit from standardised ad delivery and measurement mechanisms, broadcasters in the online world need to work a lot harder in order to provide advertisers with the mass reach that is television’s USP.

This pre-integration makes it easier for broadcasters and video service providers to monetise their OTT video offerings across all HTML5-enabled browsers and devices and increases their speed to market.

Carlos Lucas, General Manager of NexPlayer SDK, said: “We are proud of enhancing this partnership with Yospace, providing the most comprehensive streaming and Dynamic Ad Insertion experience on the web with our HTML5 as player as we are already doing across Android apps”.

David Springall, CTO of Yospace, added: “We’re delighted to add the NexPlayer HTML5 Player to our growing list of pre-integrated players. NexPlayer has a strong reputation among broadcasters for its high performance and innovative technology. By pre-integrating with our world-leading Dynamic Ad Insertion system means customers using NexPlayer can realise the benefits of OTT stream monetisation in less time than ever.”

Yospace’s server-side dynamic ad insertion technology can be applied to both live and VOD streams in a way that offers excellent playback quality, interactive functionality and real-time measurement. The system enables one-to-one addressability of ads and has been proven at scale against some of the world’s biggest sporting events.

NexPlayer HTML5 is an easy-to-integrate HTML5 player that allows video services and publishers to provide HLS and DASH streaming with an advanced feature set that includes CEA 608 Closed Captioning, Time-Shifting, Multiple Audio Tracks and Multi DRM among many others. NexPlayer SDK technology is market proven, used by over 200 premium video service providers worldwide across their multiscreen OTT apps.

Saturday’s UEFA Champions League Final was the premier sporting event of the year. It marked the culmination of a football season in which Yospace’s Dynamic Ad Insertion platform enabled monetisation across the Premier League, UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League.

As a football fan it doesn’t come any bigger than the final of the Champions League. It’s one of those events that viewers tune into no matter who they support, and the match rarely lets viewers down. Two giants of the game, in Real Madrid and Juventus, going head-to-head: one showing off the talents of the best player in the world; the other going on to score one of the all-time great team goals.

It’s easy to see why live sport is so important to a lot of broadcaster’s plans and, with the increasing number of viewers watching online, why a reliable, user-friendly online monetisation method is essential.

Come half time at a major event like the Champions League Final, we see national TV audiences go to an ad break at exactly the same moment, with a separate ad call being made on behalf of each streaming session. It’s fantastic to be able to prove the scalability of addressable DAI across multiple platforms so emphatically. I’m delighted that all our hard work is paying off.

Yospace has come a long way since our first major sports event (the Winter Olympics in 2014) and in a very short period. It’s an exciting time for the company, and I’m delighted to have so many major broadcasters across the globe on board. We’re already looking forward to next season – one in which our platform is to be used on an even larger scale. More on that to come!